Quality Awards: An Image Of Business Excellence

Across the world, increasingly more governmental organizations and industrial are doing everything possible to promote quality and to survive, the basic principle remains customer satisfaction and even more than that, it speaks of the principle of customer delight. In this sense, quality has become the source of sustained competitive advantage that provides organizations the supremacy of the global markets characterized by competition which becoming more and more intensified. Juran, one of the highest quality gurus say that “just as the twentieth century was the century of productivity, the twenty-first century will be the quality century” which is a very relevant and comprehensive statement of the economic reality of the past and a profound forecast for future business of the twenty-first century. In this regard, in order to achieve this competitive advantage, quality must be managed and this is accomplished through Total Quality Management (TQM). Quality awards models are instruments of total quality management through which quality can be assessed and improved, thus, knowing the quality awards models is critical for findings the new ways to improve the quality and performance of the organizations. The present paper aims to illustrate the best practices on quality improvement in this respect we intend to present the general framework of the quality awards for business excellence. In this sense we present the most important international quality awards, namely: "Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award", "European Quality Award" and “Romanian Quality Award J. M. Juran". For this purpose we used as main sources of analyzing the structure and the operation mode of these three important quality awards, Juran's work (which is probably the most important work in the field of quality) and other relevant sources in total quality management which treats issues related to quality awards and also we used as sources of updated information the official websites of institutions and foundations who organizing the deployment of these awards.